Do Not Ask Arizona Governor Jan Brewer About Global Warming

Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, is perhaps best known for advocating aggressive anti-immigration policies and inventing grisly crimes and blaming them on migrants to help make her case. But it turns out she gets a little worked up over climate change, too. A reporter asked her a simple question about her views on the topic, and she went a little haywire.

After she flubbed her way through a thoroughly scientifically incorrect response, and believed the cameras to be off, she "slugged" the reporter. A photographer at the scene describes how it went down:

[the reporter] had turned to a camera operator and seemed to be putting his microphone away. Brewer took her left hand, balled it into a fist and with the back of her hand she slugged the reporter on the back of his right arm. Not hard, but with enough force that he spun around to see what was going on. She leaned in real close and looked up (she's a shorter lady) and said in a whisper loud enough for most of us to hear, "Where the hell'd that come from?"

Here's the report the news station eventually ran:

Aside from being a fun little display of Ms. Brewer's political acumen—she was also currently in the news for ditching out on a governors conference and going "MIA" from her job—it's a good sign that the GOP is starting to sweat the climate issue.

As extreme weather continues to make the impact of global warming more visceral, and more and more Americans continue to align their views with that of the scientific community, it's becoming increasingly difficult for right-wing politicians to espouse their scientifically invalid views in public. They can only "slug" so many reporters before they have to at least pretend to agree with the majority of their constituents, after all.

Editor's Note: The title of this post was changed to reflect the fact that the video clearly shows that Governor Brewer didn't punch the reporter in an aggressive way, it looking much more like a chuck on the shoulder than an assault.